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Putin’s Master of Ceremonies

The night that Konstantin Ernst, the general director of Channel One, Russia’s largest state-controlled television network, turned fifty, Vladimir Putin came to the channel’s headquarters to congratulate him. As the overseer of the country’s most prominent broadcaster, Ernst has the stature of an unofficial government minister, and the two men toured Channel One’s studios, in a television tower at Ostankino, north of Moscow’s city center. A famous workaholic, Ernst spent his birthday like any other night, looking over that evening’s programming.

But he may have prepared a sly present for himself. That night, Channel One aired the first Russian showing of “Gonzo,” Alex Gibney’s documentary about Hunter S. Thompson, from 2008. It must have been an odd experience for most of the network’s viewers—a strange swerve from the channel’s middlebrow programming—but it was a typical gesture for Ernst, who has strived to retain the air of a risk-taking auteur even as he has ascended to the highest circles of power during Putin’s rule.

Ernst, who turns fifty-three this week, is the premier visual stylist of the Putin era, and he has put his considerable talents in the service of the Russian state for nearly two decades. He has now been given the most high-profile assignment of his career, and the most challenging: producing the opening ceremony at the Sochi Winter Olympics, which will begin on Friday. If the Olympics are something holy to Putin, then the opening ceremony is the holiest of holies: a demonstration of Russia’s might and prowess before hundreds of millions of viewers. Russian officials watched carefully as Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the London Summer Olympics, in 2012, earned raves, and it’s a given that they are determined to top it.

The details of Sochi’s opening show are a closely held secret, but given all that Putin believes to be at stake, and Russia’s general penchant for over-the-top displays, it is sure to be an extravagant and imperious spectacle. A handful of photos, leaked from rehearsals, suggest floating constructions with the imposing angles of socialist realism, and rumors have floated around Moscow of a performance by Tatu, the hit-making Russian duo from the early aughts, famous in part for their rumored lesbianism. One Russian newspaper has reported that the ceremony will sweep through Russian history, from the tsarist empire to Soviet might, and will include the troika from Gogol’s “Dead Souls,” Peter the Great commanding a flotilla of ships, and dozens of heroes from Russian fairy tales.

Damon Lavelle, an architect at the British firm Populous, who worked on early plans for Fisht stadium, the site of Sochi’s opening and closing ceremonies, told me that after Ernst and his team became involved “ambitions grew enormously.” The stadium, which had been planned as an open structure, had to be redesigned with a closed roof, in order to accommodate the technical demands of Ernst’s vision for the opening show. “Putin is no fool—he knows who is who in his own circle,” a long-time Russian television producer told me. “In terms of creating a show, he is No. 1—there is no other Ernst.”

Ernst is an unmatched figure in Russia’s official culture, where statist boosterism combines with high production values to create the image of a vital nation under one leader—Putin—to whom there is no alternative. Ernst’s aesthetic sensibility defines the annual Victory Day parade, on May 9th, as well as Putin’s yearly call-in shows, televised marathons that can run for more than four hours, in which he fields questions from factory workers in the Urals and concerned mothers in the Far East. Anna Kachkaeva, a former television critic for Radio Liberty, who now heads the media-communications department at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, described Ernst’s style as “ample, harmonious, elegant.” She said that his productions are marked by “a quality in the execution of the picture the things that professionals notice and viewers don’t even know they are enjoying.” (In response to my request for an interview, Ernst’s press office said that he was too busy with preparations for Sochi to meet.)

Ersnt comes from a family in the Soviet scientific establishment: his father was a specialist in biotechnology and agriculture. He, too, studied biology, and received his doctorate in 1986. But those were the days of perestroika, when information was suddenly, overwhelmingly available, and new professional opportunities were appearing in the cracks of the old Soviet state. Ernst took an interest in film, and decided to leave the scientific academy. “The old way of making television had come apart, and that created an opening for almost anyone,” he told an interviewer from Afisha, a biweekly culture and listings magazine, in 2011. He found work at “Vzglyad” (“Viewpoint”) a pioneering newsmagazine program that had a huge audience in the late nineteen-eighties.

Before long, Ernst had his own show. “Matador” premièred in 1990, in the twilight of the Soviet century. Ernst, with his long hair and black leather jacket, hosted the show, which covered foreign films and odd, art-house interests and had a rough, do-it-yourself quality—in that era, it was a window into a new world. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Ernst was one of a handful of young television producers and journalists experimenting with new styles and techniques, trying to devise a visual identity for a traumatized and disoriented country. His 1995 series of public-service advertisements, “Russian Project,” was the first attempt to use television to propagate a shared sense of values in post-Soviet Russia. Famous actors appeared in folksy scenes that conveyed elementary lessons: look after your mother, have confidence in yourself. It seemed simple, and it was, but after the confusion and rupture of the Soviet collapse, the effect was profound.

In March, 1995, the legendary television host Vladislav Listyev was shot and killed outside of his apartment, in Moscow. He had just been named the director of ORT (which later became Channel One), and his murder, never solved, was rumored to be connected to his decision to reëvaluate how ads on the network would be bought and sold. After Listyev’s murder, Ernst was thrust into the top job by Boris Berezovsky, an oligarch who was a kingmaker in Russian politics and media until he found himself on the losing side of a power struggle with Putin. Ernst only got the job, he later explained, because he was working with Listyev on a plan for new types of programming. Still, he grew into the role, and he was not shy about using the channel’s power for political ends. In 1996, Channel One, like all of Russia’s official media, did everything it could to propel Boris Yeltsin to victory in the Presidential elections. Four years later, the channel built up the image and profile of Putin at the expense of any would-be challengers and helped to insure an overwhelming victory in his first Presidential election.

As the Putin years took shape, Ernst and the channel he controlled became central instruments for building a new national culture. The goal was to break from the past without discrediting it—to rally a country that had been left defeated and unsure by the upheavals of the nineties. Ernst worked to liberate Soviet music and imagery from their Communist context, helping to craft a new state culture that linked Russia to its history without all the baggage.

Programming on Channel One, Floriana Fossato, who worked on media projects in Moscow in the aughts and now studies Russian television at University College London, said, showed “people surviving a cruel but, to a certain extent, necessary system.” Above all, Fossato told me, Russia was shown as a heroic nation. Viewers could hear about some of the country’s mistakes but remain secure that, as she put it, “we didn’t waste our lives.” The picture onscreen should be grand, proud, and, most important, attractive. The channel’s operating philosophy, Fossato said, was: “We are all bad; there isn’t a nation that is better than another. We are more honest, we admit to it. Russia is a more moral country because it doesn’t try to hide.” And, no less important: “Power is a given, you cannot challenge it.”

Ernst is generally said to be a man without a particular ideology. Those who speak to him in private say that he is full of praise for Putin, that his public-facing loyalty reflects something genuine. Ernst, like Putin, is a gosudarstvennik (a statist), who, like many people in Russia’s ruling class, finds virtue and inherent legitimacy in the state itself. The state is a timeless and self-evidently righteous entity, and its interests come first; those of the people are second. Arina Borodina, a media critic in Moscow, tried to sum up Ernst’s world view. “He doesn’t grovel to power, but, at the same time, he’s a Putinist, he’s sincerely very loyal to him.” And yet, she said, “he’s daring by nature, he likes to take risks.”

That internal contradiction may explain why Channel One looks so different from its main competitors on Russian television, Rossiya and NTV. Although all three present Putin as a leader with no challenger or equal, the propaganda offerings on the other two channels are far cruder and more grotesque. When it comes to coverage of protests against Putin, for example, or Russia’s foreign policy in Syria and Ukraine, or the government’s anti-gay laws, Channel One faithfully reproduces the Kremlin’s perspective, but it does so more soberly than its rivals. Rossiya, the country’s second channel, wholly owned by the state, is home to television personalities like Arkady Mamontov, who has suggested Pussy Riot was backed by dissidents like Berezovsky, and that the meteor which struck central Russia in 2013 was punishment for the sins of homosexuals. Dmitry Kiselev, who hosts an alarmist weekly commentary show on Rossiya, told a studio audience in April, 2012, that gays and lesbians “should be prohibited from donating blood, sperm, and, in the case of a road accident, their hearts should be either buried or cremated as unsuitable for the prolongation of life.” NTV, owned by Gazprom-Media, a holding company controlled by Yury Kovalchuk, a banker close to Putin, specializes in true-crime programs and breathless, darkly conspiratorial documentaries—including several aimed at discrediting the country’s opposition by linking it to vague foreign plots.

Channel One engages in propaganda, too: its nightly news program is full of reports on Putin’s every move and paeans to his leadership. On political topics, Ernst submits to instructions from the top; he is said to have been a regular attendee at weekly meetings in the Kremlin during which television bosses got their orders. But many credit Ernst with limiting nasty or particularly aggressive attacks on the channel. “He carries himself, considering the circumstances he’s in, like a decent person,” said Vera Krichevskaya, a television producer and director who was among the founders of Dozhd (or TV Rain) an independent cable channel that the Kremlin is trying to force off the air with a ginned-up controversy over the siege of Leningrad. (Masha Lipman wrote about the campaign against the channel, the only private network whose coverage is not decidedly pro-Putin.) Ernst has made a Faustian bargain, but his image as someone with relatively clean hands may have played a part in making him a target of envy and suspicion, disliked by his rivals at Rossiya and NTV. “People covered in mud don’t like to see someone a little less dirty than themselves,” Krichevskaya told me.

Ernst’s real passion, and his legacy, is not news but, rather, entertainment and documentary programming, perhaps a defense mechanism honed long ago: why fuss over what you can’t possibly control? He brought a number of television genres to Russia for the first time, including the late-night talk show (“Evening Urgant”), the “American Idol”-style singing competition (“Voice”), and the Oprah-like daytime chat show (“Let Them Talk”). The horror thriller “Night Watch,” produced by Channel One, in 2004, was among the first big-budget, Hollywood-style productions after the implosion of the Soviet film industry. Ernst has backed shows that were far rougher and edgier than what had previously been shown on state airwaves, such as “The School,” a series on teen-age life, made by Valeriya Gai Germanika, a young female director with a punk, counterculture style. And he retains his taste for the cultish, buying the rights to air programs like “Mad Men” and “House of Cards.”

These days, Ernst’s channel is receiving praise for a twelve-part miniseries called “Ottepel,” (“Thaw”), set in the early Khrushchev years of the mid-fifties, when the Soviet Union went through a short-lived social and political opening. The show, which aired in December, had a diverse audience and was well reviewed as a complex exploration of individuality and responsibility in an authoritarian state. One of the main characters, a thoughtful man with whom viewers are meant to sympathize, is ultimately revealed to be gay.

Nearly everyone I spoke to about Ernst, even those critical of Putin and sympathetic to the opposition, praised for his creative abilities and his talent for producing quality television. Some, though, wondered aloud about his moral responsibility. “In the past ten years, he has lowered the intellectual level of Russia and helped to create this gray mass that is easier to control,” Krichevskaya, an avowed liberal, told me. “All the same,” she said, citing the artistic work that Ernst has produced which has had a deep social resonance in Russia, “in a surprising way, I can’t make any complaints against him.”

When the legendary journalist Leonid Parfyonov, perhaps Russian television’s most respected personality, accepted a journalism prize in 2010, he took aim at the tenuous ethics of his less independent colleagues. Parfyonov, who has known Ernst for two decades, was a regular presence on NTV and Channel One in the nineties and the early aughts, but as time passed he was pushed to the margins, confined to working, infrequently, on nonpolitical documentaries. At the podium, he said, mournfully, that in Russia a correspondent on state television ultimately serves “his boss’s bosses.” He continued, “Such a correspondent is no longer a journalist but, rather, a state official following the logic of service and subordination.” Near the end of his speech, Parfyonov said, “Not being a hero myself, I cannot demand heroic deeds from others. But the least we can do is call things by their names.” Many took this as a direct salvo at Ernst, his old friend and co-worker, who was sitting in the audience.

Ernst didn’t say anything to him about the episode, Parfyonov told me, “except for what he then repeated in public: You can’t edit a Nobel Prize speech.” But what little work Parfyonov does today for state television is still on Channel One. In an e-mail, Parfyonov described what he saw in Ernst these days: “When I see Kostya consumed by producing some beautiful project, he is, on the whole, the same person I’ve known from an early age. But now he has almost unlimited possibilities, about which he’s always dreamed. He is the best television producer of his time, and the current authoritarian system, in need of him, granted him his powers.”

Many of those who work in television in Moscow wonder if Sochi will be Ernst’s last great show, if his time has passed and too many people now want to see him fall. Anything less than a magnificent and widely praised opening ceremony will be regarded as a failure or, at least, painted as such by Ernst’s enemies. He has a long-simmering conflict with the Kovalchuk brothers, close Putin associates who have acquired several media assets in recent years and own a sizable minority share of Channel One.

But what may, in the end, bring Ernst down is the shifting tone of Putin’s imperium: the current moment has been marked by an ascendant fundamentalism, which requires officials to foreswear compromise and offer displays of overwrought, aggressive loyalty. There is less room for individualists, even those who have long been willing to subsume their individuality to the service of the regime. Putin seems to have discovered a kind of ideology that holds up Russia as a bastion of conservative values in the face of the degenerate West, and Ernst may not have the purity or fanaticism that these new times require. For now, he remains famous, powerful, and very wealthy. (Many of Channel One’s productions are made by a company owned by Ernst’s wife, an arrangement indicative of how money and power often cohabitate in Russia.) He has been allowed a migalka, a flashing blue siren that indicates official privilege, for his car.

In 2011, Oleg Kashin, a journalist and columnist sympathetic to the opposition, wrote a satirical memoir in Ernst’s voice for the weekly magazine of Kommersant, a Moscow paper. Looking back from some point in the distant future, Kashin’s Ernst writes, “This is what no one ever wanted to understand, that I, controlling my empire, always remained on my own. I made all decisions alone and always carried my responsibilities alone: political, artistic, financial.”

Not long ago, I asked Kashin what made Ernst unique. “Compared to other television bosses in Russia, Konstantin Ernst carries himself not like a bureaucrat but like an artist who is forced to coöperate with the state,” he said. On Friday, in Sochi, the product of that coöperation will have its most spectacular expression yet.